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An Affinity Diagram is a specific kind of creative thinking (brainstorming) that you can use to organise significant amounts of information into meaningful categories. It will help you to clarify and make sense of a large or complex problem.

If you have a good relationship and mutual trust between yourself and members of your team, they will be more receptive to new ways of thinking, including any improvement methods that you may want to introduce. This section from the NHS Improvement Leaders' Guide suggests how you can build trust with your colleagues.

The next phase of improving services will not be easy (the easy stuff has already been done) so we need to tap into other areas to get new ideas. Using creativity tools can help you come up with these new ideas, solutions and perspectives.

The 'treat day surgery as the norm for elective surgery' High Impact Change states 'Switching to day case supports the national imperative of giving patients more choice and reducing waiting times. There are enormous benefits in adopting this approach. There is clear evidence to show that patients who have day surgery have an overall better experience, improved clinical outcomes and less risk of hospital acquired infections.'

Demand management is about understanding demand. The process should focus on using planning and forecasting skills to ensure patients receive the most appropriate care in the right setting. It is not about managing the number and type of referrals.

A way of helping managers understand and respond to people's feelings when confronted by organisational change. In the discomfort zone, people are most likely to change and learn how to do things differently.

These diagrams are a simple way to show how an overall improvement goal can be broken down into its underpinning drivers and projects. As a logic tool they allow you to communicate your improvement strategy and support the development of a measurement framework to monitor progress.

Organisational change can substantially impact on employees' sense of freedom and ability to contribute. It is important therefore for managers to be aware of the factors promoting empowerment and how these can be integrated into the change process.

Piles of work to do later, infrequent decision making for groups of patients, batching work and lists all represent a wait in a patient journey or diagnostic pathway. Reduce these, and you will also reduce referral to treatment times and variation in waiting times.

We all have different ways of thinking about and tackling challenges. By using this 'fresh eyes' approach and thinking like someone else, you will be able to come up with a solution, or a new way of getting things done.

Using patient files helps you to find out what actually happens to a patient. By visualising how the whole patient journey currently works, you are able to identify inefficiency as well as opportunities for improvement.

Do you want a comprehensive list of the benefits that a project has for patients and the NHS? By going through a specific set of questions in conjunction with the flowchart in this tool, you can achieve this.

Pareto analysis helps you identify the changes that will yield the greatest benefits. It is particularly useful when you have to decide between many possible courses of action and resources are limited.

More and more people are using the term 'patient flow'. In simple terms, flow is about uninterrupted movement, like driving steadily along the motorway without interruptions, or being stuck in a traffic jam.

Plan ahead: along all stages in a patient's journey. This ensures that each step of the programme is planned for and scheduled so everyone knows what to expect and when to expect it: this helps to reduce delays.

This six-stage service improvement guide provides a framework for service improvement within the NHS. We suggest you read through the whole project guide before you undertake any actions relating to the stages. This will help you get an overall picture of what all the stages involve.

Protocol based care enables NHS staff to address the key questions of what should be done, when, where and by whom at a local level. It provides an effective framework for working in multi-disciplinary teams.

A lot of our work adds value to patients: right referral, right diagnostic tests, right diagnosis, right information and communication, right advice, right treatment, right aftercare and right handover. Doing more things that add value will reduce waiting times.

This is a simple tool, you can use it to make sure that everyone is clear about roles and responsibilities. It works well within teams, between teams, for strategic management and for project management settings.

Poor communication can cause delays and waste time. Situation-Background-Assessment-Recommendation (SBAR) is a simple framework which enables staff to share clear and consistent information about a patient's condition.

Using this tool, a cross functional team can produce a visual map of how things operate now, identifying all the steps in a patient's pathway. It also helps the team to identify a strategy to implement change.

This tool helps you identify what the very best system of care could look like. It encourages you to look beyond 'usual thinking' and aim for what people really wish for from the health system.

You can also access a collection of improvement tools via the Improvement Network
website, (jointly sponsored by the NHS Institute). The site offers free access to a suite of
improvement tools to help support the needs of managers. These are accessible to public
sector managers and practitioners across health, local government and police sectors.
The tools cover a range of 16 topics including communication, change management and
partnership working.